Euro Road Trip Pt 3

Euro Road Trip Pt 3

Today was a shorter day than yesterday(good job really as I am still recovering form Bronchitis and 2 12 hr days in a row is bound to have a bad effect).

I went into the city of london for a meeting at the Centre Point CBI Conference Centre, for the initial meeting of the UK BI Partner Expert Community. This was a meeting of various UK based partners with a focus on BI, I did QA (no demos this time) for about an hour. It was good to get some insight as to what our partners are doing and also what resources we, Microsoft make available to them to help them as partners. One of the UK partner managers worked through all the programs that we make available and hopefully it was helpful to the folks in the meeting as it was certainly educational for me, as we in the dev team don't get enough exposure to our field and the programs and support they provide for customers and partners.

As a side node I had a very depressing technology experience when trying to get to the conference centre this morning. I slept in as I am fighting jet lag still so I took a cab from the hotel at Heathrow Airport to the centre. When I got in the cab the driver had no idea where were going but asked for the PostCode(Zip Code for those in the US) and proceeded to type it into his GPS based Nav System! Now grateful as I was that he managed to find the place, I have never seen before a london cabbie use an A-Z never mind a GPs Nav System. Now to be fair this was not a Black Cab, I don't know if they are the only ones that have to do "the knowledge" or not but changed days indeed. I would advise that the cabbies use a nav system that has real time updates as while the route we took was probbaly the shortest it managed to take us through what seemed like the worst of the downtown london traffic jams, which could give Seattle a run for its money.